Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and may provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices include, for example, several types of mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs), gaming consoles, tablets, netbooks and laptop computers with wireless 802.11 or Bluetooth® capabilities.
Portable electronic devices such as PDAs or smart telephones are generally intended for handheld use and ease of portability. Smaller devices are generally desirable for portability. In many cases such devices include a pair of housings that couple to one another and that move relative to one another between, for example, a closed (or stowed) configuration and an opened (or deployed) configuration. By one approach, for example, a first such housing may include a display while a second such housing may include a keyboard.
Many such devices employ one or more mechanical connectors to connect one such housing to another. So configured, the two housings can pivot with respect to one another about the connector(s). While useful for many purposes, physical, mechanical connectors are not necessarily fully satisfactory for all application settings and users. Not only can a mechanical coupling give rise to design limitations, but also it can restrict the physical manipulability of the resultant device to only a very specific configuration.